Thich Nhat Hanh in The Dewdrop:

What are the most basic elements of love and how can we manifest them in our lives and our relationships? This is the question that Thich Nhat Hanh tackles in his short book, ‘True Love’. Looking at human love through the lens of Buddhist teaching, he breaks it down into four aspects: loving-kindness, compassion, joy and freedom and uses his direct and simple style to advise us how to put these elements to work in our own lives. 

According to Buddhism, there are four elements of true love. The first is maitri, which can be translated as loving-kindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer. Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha. If a husband, for example, does not understand his wife’s deepest troubles, her deepest aspirations, if he does not understand her suffering, he will not be able to love her in the right way. Without understanding, love is an impossible thing.

More here.

If I had just a little bit of wisdom

If I had just a little bit of wisdom
I should walk the Great Path and fear only straying from
…… it.
Though the way is quite broad
People love shortcuts.

The court is immaculate,
While the fields are overgrown with weeds,
And the granaries are empty.
They wear silk finery,
Carry sharp swords,
Sate themselves on food and drink
having wealth in excess.
They are called thieving braggarts.

This is definitely not the way.

Lao Tzu
from Tao Te Ching
Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005

From the MIT Press Reader:

When Daniel Dennett’s essay collection “Brainstorms” was published in 1978, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was just emerging. Dennett was a young scholar who wanted to get philosophers out of their armchairs and into conversations with psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. “I tried in ‘Brainstorms’ to write about the problems in language accessible to all serious thinkers, as jargon-free as possible, with lots of examples,” he writes in the preface to the 40^th-anniversary edition of the book.

Some of the chapters contained in the collection cast longer shadows than others. “Where Am I?,” featured below in its entirety, has had a remarkable trajectory.

More here.

Roselyne Min at Euronews:

Scientists have successfully developed a new, controllable prosthetic extra thumb designed to enhance productivity.

Researchers at Cambridge University say the robotic thumb can help expand the capacity of the human hand, from carrying multiple beverage glasses and shuffling playing cards to performing surgery.

“We are also really excited about potential opportunities of using the thumb to enhance productivity in work settings, especially those that are relying on their hand’s manual dexterity in order to accomplish their work,” said Tamar Makin, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

“This can be anywhere between manual labourers that are trying to solder a complicated kit or even surgeons that have to negotiate between many instruments at the same time,” she added.

More here.  And check out the video at the link.

Prashant Kidambi in the Times Literary Supplement:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the unruly coalition governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected the deepening of democratic norms and a shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. Others pointed to high voter turnouts – especially among the poor – and the rise of elected representatives from hitherto subordinated castes as proof that democracy had been profoundly vernacularized.

To be sure, these accounts were cognizant of the deficiencies and contradictions of democratic politics in India, including the concomitant resurgence of exclusionary identities, the criminalization of politics, the elevation of performative equality over substantive redistribution and the deepening of social cleavages along lines of caste and religion. But there was nonetheless a broad consensus about the legitimacy of India’s democratic credentials. Today there are many who question, with good reason, the country’s inclusion in the roster of democracies at all.

More here.

Petra Loho at The Observer:

At the heart of Pop Art, Lichtenstein adeptly appropriated and reimagined iconic symbols, from Mickey Mouse to love and war comics, to popular advertising motifs. Through his masterful reinterpretations, he challenged conventional notions of high and low culture, inviting viewers to reconsider the significance of everyday imagery in the realm of art.

His distinctive style, characterized by the utilization of Ben-Day dots, infused these familiar images with irony, challenging societal constructs of femininity and masculinity entrenched within the post-war consumer landscape. His artworks served as a poignant commentary on the burgeoning American women’s, anti-Vietnam, and anti-nuclear movements, reflecting the zeitgeist of the era. During the inauguration of the exhibition, Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schröder remarked on Lichtenstein’s art, stating, “In the 1960s, at the height of abstract expressionism, Roy Lichtenstein returned to representational, self-reflective art and, with a lot of irony, broke down the boundaries between high art and everyday culture.”

more here.

Kozlov and Wolf in Nature:

Anthony Fauci, the former head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), emphatically fended off allegations at a Republican-led hearing in Washington DC today that his agency funded research that created the COVID-19 pandemic or that he coordinated a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins, calling the claims “simply preposterous”. The 3 June session was one of the most anticipated hearings hosted by the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The subcommittee has held 27 hearings or briefings over the past 15 months to examine the federal government’s response to the pandemic and to uncover the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

As has been the case in most of the hearings, Fauci’s questioning reflected a deep political divide in the US government. Republicans criticized Fauci’s oversight of NIAID-funded research grants and of his staff members, and Democrats sang the praises of the former chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, commending him on a distinguished career that has saved lives through his work advancing research on AIDS and developing COVID-19 vaccines. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, told Nature that the hearing was a Republican “attempt at revisionist history” to ignore the policy failures of the administration of former US president Donald Trump early during the pandemic and to “blame the scientists”.

More here.

Rachel Poser in The New York Times:

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

More here.

Hermione Lee at the NYRB (from 2015):

The stories selected in Family Furnishings, a fine and timely follow-up to Alice Munro’s winning of the 2013 Nobel Prize, date (it says on the cover) from 1995 to 2014, thus making a sequel to the Selected Stories of 1996, which drew on the previous thirty years of Munro’s writing. But there is one exception to this dating in the new selection, the magnificent story “Home.” “Home” was first published in a collection of Canadian stories in 1974, so it was written when Munro was in her early forties. She then went on working on it for thirty years, revising, correcting, and changing its shape, and it was republished in much-altered form in 2006: so it appears here as a “late” story. That process of revisiting is fundamental to Munro’s methods. She constantly revises her work; she reuses her subject matter with the utmost concentration and attention; and her characters, like her (and often they are like her), compulsively return to their pasts.

“Home” tells of a visit, in the first person, to the farmhouse she grew up in between the 1930s and the 1950s. All Munro readers know this place, and know that it is a farm in Morris Township, Huron County, Western Ontario, near the town of Wingham, though it often isn’t named in the stories, or is called something else.

more here.

Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

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Yael van der Wouden at Literary Hub:

For a few years now I’ve been teaching a class on erotic writing. Most of it follows the same structure of any creative-writing class—we discuss character and motivation—but the content, you can imagine, takes on a different slant.

It’s both a fun and hard class to teach; hard because the students are immediately thrown into vulnerability, immediately figuring out how much of themselves they’re willing lay bare before strangers, and fun in realizing that everyone else in the class is embarrassed in exactly the same way, and that everyone is always, always, a little bit of a freak.

A few interesting observations: good sex in the bedroom does not automatically make for good sex on paper…

More here.

Jo Lauder at ABC News (of Australia):

We’re comparing an electric car and a traditional petrol one and looking at the life-cycle emissions — that is, all the emissions produced from cradle to grave.

For both types of car, these are the key stages where emissions are produced:

• • manufacturing of the car,
  • production of the battery, especially for electric cars
  • running the cars over their life-cycle, either on petrol or electricity
  • disposal and recycling of the vehicle at the end of its life, including batteries

We’ll also compare electric cars in different states because each state uses different amounts of fossil fuels for electricity, which affects how “clean” the car is.

More here.

Yascha Mounk at Persuasion:

William Galston is an author and academic who holds the Ezra K. Zilker Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Galston was also deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton. His latest book is Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy.

Yascha Mounk: Yesterday, we saw that a jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump guilty on all counts, the first time that a US president was found to be criminally guilty. This seems like a major moment, but there have been major moments in the past that have turned out not to be quite what they seemed. How much do you think this is going to transform the presidential campaign and the fate of Donald Trump?

William Galston: Well, I will go out on a limb and suggest that in the context of everything else, this event is likely to have only limited significance and impact. And it may well be washed away by the results of the upcoming presidential debate on June 27th, which I regard as potentially a much more transformative event than the outcome of this trial.

More here.

Santiago Zabala at Art Spiel:

Unlike many art historians and art critics, philosophers do not look for works of art that are necessarily beautiful or interesting. Most of us—at least those educated in the continental tradition of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Arendt—instead look for works that disclose a theoretical stance. Martin Heidegger’s writing on Van Gogh’s shoes paintings, Arthur Danto on Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, and Jacques Rancière on Alfredo Jaar’s photographs are paradigmatic examples. This does not mean we do not care about the artist’s effort in creating such work; rather, we focus more on whether the work discloses an aesthetic notion, political idea, or anthropological concept that has meaning for society at large. Artists, for us, have the same ontological purpose as scientists or politicians. A great work of art, new scientific discovery, or progressive policy can change people’s relationship with reality. If these works, discoveries, and policies change this relationship, it is not necessarily because they are “better” than others but because they touch our existence to a greater degree.

Since the publication of my book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), friends have pointed out to me works of art that thrust us into absent emergencies. These, as I will now explain, are our greatest emergencies—and the ones we do not confront.

More here.

Lou Fencher in EBX:

His father set a number of things in place so that after death “there would be little bombs that would explode upon me,” Sedaris tells me. “Like when I graduated from college, he said he’d set up an IRA for me and talked for years about it. You know, he never set it up. And he left me the minimum amount of money you can leave somebody so they wouldn’t contest the will. When I found out about it and confronted him, that was his big disappointment, that I’d found out before he died. It was also in his will that I would get any boats or cars that he owned. We’d never had a boat and I don’t even know how to drive. My father took pains to sell his 1964 mint-condition Porsche a year before he died just so I wouldn’t get it. It’s nasty things, hurtful things. I’m not hurting for money, but it’s not about that. It bothers me that I’m allowing him to hurt me. Everyone else in my family is getting two-and-a-half million dollars. If he had left me that two-and-a-half million dollars, I’d probably be thinking, you know, he’s not so bad, maybe I just misunderstood him. But to have been treated that way in life and then in death as well? I feel pathetic being a 65-year-old man whining because his father wasn’t nice. And then it bothers me that I’m being pathetic.”

More here.